John C Calhoun: A Biography - Softcover

Irving H. Bartlett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393332861 ISBN 13: 9780393332865

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994

Synopsis

John C. Calhoun was a rare figure in American history: a lifelong politician who was also a profound political philosopher. Vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, he was a dominant presence in the U.S. Senate. Now comes a major new biography from the author of Daniel Webster.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In this important and highly readable biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving Bartlett sees a man almost unique in American history, a lifelong politician who was also a profound political philosopher. Born on the South Carolina frontier, Calhoun grew up in a postrevolutionary culture which valued both African slavery and the republican ideology of the Founding Fathers. He was orphaned in his teens and, with almost no formal education, suddenly became a man. In less than ten years he had become a Yale graduate, a lawyer, a former state legislator, and a congressman-elect prepared to help James Madison lead the country into the War of 1812. As a congressman and later as James Monroe's secretary of war Calhoun articulated the nationalism of the new nation as cogently as any other American leader. Calhoun was ambitious beyond his years. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the disputed presidential election of 1824 but was easily elected vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Determined to avoid the obscurity of that office, Calhoun managed to get into monumental public disputes with both presidents and resigned in the last days of Jackson's first administration to become senator from South Carolina and champion his state's right to nullify the Tariff of 1832. Along with his famous contemporaries Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Calhoun dominated the Senate of the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Serving briefly as secretary of state in the beleaguered Tyler administration, he played a key role in the annexation of Texas and created a furor on both sides of the Atlantic with his strident defense of American slavery and his denunciation of what he perceived as thepseudophilanthropy of British abolitionism. Returning to the Senate, he acted as peacemaker in helping avoid a near war with Britain over the Oregon boundary dispute, and he persistently opposed the popular Mexican War. Long before his death in 1850 Calhoun had become known as the cast-iron leader of the South, who never curried to popular opinion, spurned party loyalty, and defended slavery and states' rights with a vigor and intelligence that even leading abolitionists had to respect. In this major new biography Irving Bartlett goes behind the cast-iron image to explain the cultural and psychological forces that shaped Calhoun's political career and thought; he maintains that however wrong Calhoun was about slavery, many of his ideas still speak to us today.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A scholarly, limpid life of the southern statesman and nullifier. Bartlett (American Civilization/UMass at Boston; Daniel Webster, 1978) tries his engaging best at a tough task: to bring to life someone who was called ``the cast-iron man'' by his own contemporaries. Born to Irish immigrants who'd settled in South Carolina and become wealthy and prominent, Calhoun (1782-1850) studied at Yale and, though an adherent of Jeffersonian republicanism, at the heavily Federalist Litchfield Law School. Soon disenchanted with the law's pedantry, he entered public life, assuming office in the US House of Representatives soon after marrying his second cousin and becoming one of the largest plantation masters in South Carolina. Bartlett, while only glancing at his subject's personal life, covers in rapid succession the series of crises that shaped Calhoun's evolution from avid nationalist to champion of sectionalism and nullification, and that thrust him into prominence: his career as a war hawk in the House, which helped propel the country into the War of 1812; his turbulent term as secretary of war under Monroe, which led him into fateful confrontations with Andrew Jackson over Jackson's headstrong Florida policy; his stints as Vice President under John Quincy Adams and Jackson, during which he advocated the power of states to nullify federal laws; and his years as a senatorial defender of slavery and the southern way of life. Bartlett also points out that Calhoun, in his term as secretary of state under Tyler, became one of the architects of the policy that led to the annexation of Texas as a slave state. Finally, Calhoun returned to the Senate, continued to shape public opinion on the Mexican War, and in his Disquisition on Government (1848) achieved the ultimate expression of his views on nullification. Bartlett paints Calhoun as many of his peers no doubt viewed him: brilliant, utterly absorbed in politics and personal ambition, formidable--even admirable in many ways--but not very likable. A fine contribution to antebellum scholarship. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0393332861
• ISBN 13: 9780393332865
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416